


the name game

by sapphee



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Asian American Characters, Chinese American, Diaspora Feels, Family, Gen, Identity, Microaggressions, Racism, cantonese
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 21:54:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12285123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphee/pseuds/sapphee
Summary: Names are weird. Or: What's in a name?(for day 3 of Chowder Week 2017. prompt: future)





	the name game

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pepperfield](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pepperfield/gifts).
  * Inspired by [your life as a transient variable](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10841439) by [pepperfield](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pepperfield/pseuds/pepperfield). 



> for day 3 of [chowderweek](http://chowderweek.tumblr.com): future (kinda?); builds off of [this](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/157599235009/chowder-hc-graduation-stole) and [this](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/154259211894/me-does-chowder-have-a-chinese-name-that-isnt-on).
> 
> idk, one day i was helping my dad clean out his stuff in the basement and i had a revelation about english/chinese names when i was looking at his old checks (i mean, unlike chris' dad, my dad doesn't have an english name, but it still prompted this Revelation for me)?? so i was like, why not project onto chowder again 
> 
> this is dedicated to all the canto chinese americans i've come across in this fandom <33 esp pepperfield, who wrote the amazing chowder fic (the "inspired by" link) that i still love so much!! i wanted to gift this to you as a thank you for the one you wrote, i just hope this isn't too hard to get through bc it is..........not very good al;fdjkals;djf;s
> 
> notes on each of the chows' chinese names can be found in the link in the end notes, as well as a mini glossary for canto terms used in this fic (family member titles). thanks to my mom and [yun](http://chrisfranklinchow.tumblr.com) for helping me come up with the chinese names! i def wouldn't have been able to do it by myself haha (esp bc as i was trying to come up with names by myself, i started having all this existential angst about like whether i would want to or actually can give my kids chinese names, if i have any, bc i'm nowhere near fluent or anything?? rip rip)

The first thing Chris learns about Dad in their musty basement surrounded by dusty boxes is that Dad has not thrown anything out in _at_ _least_ thirty years.

The second thing Chris learns about Dad on that hot August afternoon the summer before his last year at Samwell is that Dad has signed a lot of checks in his lifetime, some at least ten years before Chris was even born, and that he’s _kept_ them all this time. Chris knows that Dad kept them all because Chris has two piles of them sitting by his feet to go through to confirm they can be shredded before he can give them to Kay, who’s manning their really old paper shredder, which has three years on Kay, making Chris older than it by just one measly year.

The third thing Chris learns about Dad while he’s being made to help Dad finally clean out everything for the first time in his fifty-odd years of existence for Lunar New Year—even though he won’t even be home for it because he’ll be at Samwell, but does that matter? No. Not to Mom, and especially not to a smug, delighted Kay—is that Dad has apparently been writing in the small, blocky way Chris has never been able to emulate since at least high school, which is when Dad immigrated here from Hong Kong. For someone like Chris, whose handwriting varies on a day-to-day basis, that is just amazing, especially because Dad didn’t start using English so heavily until he got here, because it means that Dad has been writing like this _for forty years_.

The fourth thing Chris learns—well, despite feeling alienated from Chinese culture, and all the guilt that comes with that, four will always be the unluckiest, most cursed number on the planet, so there is no fourth thing.

The fifth thing Chris learns about Dad while he scans each of the shark-themed (looks like Dad’s predilection for sharks as the hockey team _and_ the animal is genetic) checks for anything related to Liberty Mutual to save is, well, he’s not sure. The moment feels significant though, even if he’s not sure why he’s still smoothing his fingers over this one check and hasn’t moved on to the next. Ignoring the steadfast humming of the paper shredder that Kay’s enthusiastically feeding paper to, he runs his thumb over the check again, feeling the indentations most likely made by the Bic ballpoint pen that’s always in Dad’s front shirt pocket.

It’s just a monthly payment Dad made to Sears for some windows or whatever. What does that matter? Then, almost as soon as he’s picked up on the fact that something is different about this check, he realizes it. There, in the top left corner, innocuous and unassuming, the check states Dad’s name, not as Kwok Leung Chow, but as Jim Chow. Jim.

He looks at the next checks. They all say Jim Chow after March of 1987, as do all the other documents he looks at after grabbing the pile Kay was shredding. His signature has changed, too.

It’s out of his mouth before he even realizes. “Dad, you weren’t always Jim Chow.”

“Well, _duh_.” Kay snatches it all back, taking the checks, too. “It’s not like _his_ parents gave him his English name.”

“No, but.” He turns back to Dad, who’s still busy looking through a box. From the slightly less yellowing of the paper than the others he’s seen, Chris guesses that he’s somewhere in the 90s. “You were in your twenties when you changed your name.”

“Yeah, I changed it when I turned twenty-five.” Dad fiddles with his glasses, setting aside an old electricity bill. “Why?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I guess I only just realized that the name you go by now wasn’t, like, given to you by your parents,” Chris finishes off weakly, his brain whirring.

“The thing _I_ don’t get is why _Jim,_ Dad,” Kay says, folding her hands under her chin. “Why Jim and not James. It’s kind of weird, like. Chris isn’t Christopher; I’m Kay, not Katherine or whatever; a bunch of my Asian friends are Jenny, not Jennifer, or Ben, not Benjamin. Tom, not Thomas. Like, our English names are all _nicknames_. It’s weird.”

“Huh. Never thought of it that way,” Chris says, before he forgets that Dad’s still in the room. At least Dad just looks amused, not insulted. “Wait. Dad. You’d been in America for around ten years by that point. Why change your name then and not earlier? Why not right when you arrived?”

When Dad doesn’t reply immediately, Kay elbows Chris, who’s already turning red. The piles of paper she was gleefully feeding into the voracious paper shredder have been completely forgotten. “Sorry if Chris here phrased it _really badly_ or if you don’t want to answer.”

“I was just about to apologize when you interrupted,” Chris hisses, elbowing her back. “Really, Dad if you don’t—”

Dad waves him off. “No, I just hadn’t thought about it in a really long time. This is probably a good time to get Mom down here, too. Amy?”

“Yeah? I’m still going through the boxes Chris and Kay brought down from the attic _._ ”

“Take a break, and get down here. They want to ask you something.”

Mom’s footsteps down are quiet and quick. She’s the only one in the family who doesn’t have to duck to avoid hitting the short ceiling right before entering the basement.

“What’s up?” Mom surveys the basement. “This place looks a little better.”

“We’ve filled five boxes with stuff to throw out already,” Dad says cautiously, because the stuff he’s accumulated has been a point of contention for as long as Chris can remember. Dad relaxes when Mom gives him an approving nod.

“Then Chris derailed us by asking about Dad’s name.” Kay elbows his side. He’s going to have bruises tomorrow.

“Way to throw me under the bus, _Kay_.” Chris then turns red again. “I was just… interested? Because I noticed Dad’s checks were all in his Chinese name and then everything was suddenly in his English name? Oh, and also, Kay wanted to know why our names aren’t short for anything, like why it doesn’t say ‘Christopher’ on my birth certificate.” He dodges her elbow successfully that time.

“Oh, that’s easy.” Mom takes the scrunchie out of her hair and starts redoing her bun. “We gave you these names because they’re easy for our parents to pronounce. Especially my parents, because they know a lot less English than Dad’s.”

Kay looks confused. “But we have Chinese names, don’t we? They could always call us by those.”

“They used to, remember? We all did, when you were still in elementary school. But then you got older and wouldn’t respond to them anymore.”

“Yeah. The white kids used to call me ‘Ching-chong’ and say that was short for ‘Ching-a-ling Chong-a-long,’” Chris says. Even now, years after, he can still feel his blood boil.

“I mean, Popo and Gonggong weren’t completely surprised about that,” Mom says. “They saw that already with me. We used to get into so many fights about what they could call me, what I should call myself. They didn’t see why I wanted to go by my English name; I didn’t see the point of having my Chinese name as my middle name. I went by Amy Yeung most of the time, which made life easier, at least on the phone, since it’s a pretty common American surname if you’re only going by sound. That changed with email. But everyone always had something to say when they found out about my full name. They’d admonish me for never telling them I had such an exotic middle name and ask me to write ‘Chun Sau’ out for them. And then how to write or say their names in ‘my language.’ I felt like I was a zoo animal. It didn’t matter to them that I’d been born and raised in San Francisco, that my Chinese name was one of the only things I knew how to write in Chinese, or that I knew very little Chinese other than my name.”

Silence rings in the air for a moment, before Chris swallows and asks, “Is that why our Chinese names aren’t our middle names?”

Mom sighs. “Yeah, I didn’t want you to have to go through what I did.”

“What’d you do about the racists, though?” Kay asks.

“I wrote their names in English.”

Chris is too shocked to react for a full second, while Kay’s laughter comes out in gasps. “Holy crap, Mom. That’s amazing. _You’re_ amazing.”

Mom blushes. As if only now realizing what she said, Kay blushes, too.

“How about you, Dad?” Kay asks. Chris knows this move—no one in their family is good at accepting compliments (or doling them out), which is why it’s always best to just quickly change the subject. “Why Jim?”

Dad shrugs. “I got tired of people saying my name wrong, and I got rejected from every single grad school I applied to, so I just changed it to the easiest one I could think of. The easiest one that my own parents—and future mentors, colleagues, and students—could pronounce. Deciding on my new name took maybe five minutes?”

“That’s _it_?” Kay asks.

“ _Kay_ ,” Chris hisses in warning, but as always, Kay pays him no heed.

“So you just chose it because it’s easy? Not because you liked the name?”

Dad shrugs again. “My Chinese name has always been my ‘real’ name, so to speak. I got used to responding to people calling me by the butchered English pronunciation of my name, but it always bothered me on some level. After two years of grad school rejections, I asked my undergrad major advisor for advice on how to become a better applicant, and he very bluntly told me my name was too hard to pronounce, that no one was going to believe that I was going to grad school for English, even if my English actually was better than the people who would tell me I spoke unusually good English. That nothing was wrong with my application; I just needed a name like George, or Henry. Philip, Edward, Mark.”

“I just can’t get over how you took maybe five minutes to decide on a name. And that you chose it just because it’s easy to pronounce. Do you even like that name?” Kay asks.

“I don’t _hate_ it. Maybe I would feel differently if I was born here or came here earlier than I did. I feel equally Chinese and American, maybe a little more American than Chinese, but not by much. But I’ve never felt that ‘Jim’ was my real name—it’s always just been a necessity for things like getting into grad school, a job, a house… Just something that I _had_ to do.”

“I never felt like my Chinese name could be mine,” Chris confesses, after a moment. “When I was younger, I think I loved not having my Chinese name as my middle name. I was different from all the Asian kids I knew.”

“It doesn’t stop the other kids from asking about your Chinese name, though. If I told them, they’d say, ‘So your English name _is_ your Chinese name’—half of it, at least—or ‘You have two Kay’s in your name? That’s weird.’ I never could get them to understand that I was named after Mom’s best friend, and that Mama named me Wai Kay so that my name could technically work in both English and Cantonese.”

“Yeah, like when I first got to college and started taking Intro to Chinese, my professor always thought I wasn’t paying attention in class when she called on me. But it wasn’t really my fault—I was one of the only people there who already had a Chinese name, but I wasn’t used to hearing it in Mandarin. And she always seemed to hold me to a higher standard, too, even though I was pretty much on the same level as everyone else and had explained to her I couldn’t really speak Cantonese to begin with, let alone read and write Chinese or understand Mandarin. My tutor was an upperclassman from Beijing. We sat in the library for half an hour, him helping me practice responding when someone calls me by my Chinese name in Mandarin. Afterward, he told me I was the first Chinese person he’d ever met to have parents who grew up here. Other Chinese American students, he said he understood, because at least their own parents were US immigrants who had been born and raised in China. But me? I was weird. He said I was the weirdest, possibly least Chinese person he’d ever met. And well, it’s not like I disagreed. It’s why I stopped taking Chinese after the two-year foreign language requirement, even though I had initially thought about minoring in it.”

“Oh, Chris.” To his surprise, Mom comes over and _hugs_ him. “I had no idea. I had no idea about you either, Kay. Get over here.”

Mom hugs them both tightly, before releasing them, only for them both to immediately be swept up by Dad, who is the same height as Chris, but lifts them both an inch off the ground anyway. “I’m sorry. We both are.”

“Does it ever get easier?” Chris finds himself asking. “To not feel so guilty about being so different from the people who came before us? To break the pattern by having English names, and going by those most of the time? To not feel so bad about feeling so… disconnected to Chinese stuff?”

“Yeah, does it?” Kay asks.

“You know, I don’t know,” Mom says thoughtfully. “I myself am still figuring it out. I’ve found little things that help me connect to Chinese culture—that’s why we only have Cantopop CDs in the car—but… I’m sorry. I made assumptions about your experiences based off my own, in the hopes that you wouldn’t have to go through the same struggles I did. And you didn’t. You went through different ones because of decisions I made, like not putting your Chinese name on the birth certificate.”

Dad puts a hand on Mom’s shoulder. “We both did. We both wanted you to not have to deal with any of those things, but you did and do. We should have realized you were always going to have to face tough things like these because you were immediately put into a house with three different cultures—Chinese, American, and Chinese American—when you were born. I had personally emphasized more American stuff because I thought that would help you succeed. I hadn’t realized that that would affect how you felt about the other parts of you.”

“I understand why you did it,” Kay says, fiddling with her shirt.

“Me, too,” Chris says.

“We’re going to change things around here,” Dad says. “Forgive the corniness, but we’re all dealing with different but related stuff here—though it doesn’t mean we have to face it by ourselves.”

“And you know how we can start?” Mom asks.

“How?” Dad says, almost hesitantly.

“By getting rid of your stuff. These boxes aren’t going to throw themselves out. We can shred more paper while we figure out what to do, because while I’d love to continue talking about this, we have a lot of stuff to get through today, so let’s multitask. Up you get!”

As if suddenly remembering its existence (or knowing, well, all of them, feeling relieved that the charged conversation has been defused), Kay rushes back to the paper shredder and starts feeding paper into it again.

Throughout the afternoon, the conversation meanders like it usually does, between topics like all the boxes that are all across the living room floor above them that they still have to go through (Mom) and vaccinations for college (Dad, about Kay) and what to pack for college (Chris, about Kay) and guilting older brothers into taking over paper shredding duties because the industrious master of the paper shredder’s hands are now shaking too much from all the vibrations from the paper shredder.

But for the first time, it’s mixed with other stuff, like the anxiety Mom’s felt since she was a child acting as a language broker for her parents and how Dad used to eat his mooncake topped with ice cream at college and how Chris does that too and how Kay feels about going off to college with so many white people around for the first time in her life and how Chris and Mom and Dad dealt with it. It feels a little weird—pieces he didn’t even know were missing are now all clicking in place, which is an ineffable sensation—but it’s a good kind of weird. He likes it.

—

The first thing Chris learns about his family in their slightly less musty basement with about half the boxes they started out with is that they all have baggage about their names and have had it for at least their _whole lives_. Mom tells them about the debate she had with Popo and Gonggong about whether to have her English or Chinese name first and how her kindergarten teacher assumed she couldn’t speak English after seeing her Chinese name and stuck her in an ESL class for two days until the ESL teacher finally brought her back and how her heart rate would spike anytime someone found out about her Chinese name. Thinking about the similarities in their experiences even though they took place thirty to forty years apart, Chris wonders if having a Chinese name for a middle name or not actually makes any difference.

The second thing Chris learns about his family on the slightly cooler evening of that hot August day the summer before he goes back to Samwell for his last year there is that Kay has been thinking about how she wants to spell her Chinese name for her middle name, because unlike Chris, whose middle name is Franklin after his godfather, Kay doesn’t have a middle name right now and wants to add her Chinese name. But there are many things to consider, like whether she wants to use Cantonese or Mandarin romanization and whether she wants to put a space in between the two words to make it clear that her Chinese name is made of two characters or if she just wants it to appear as one word. She decides on the latter, so that her initials are wieldy as three letters, instead of four. Four is cursed, anyway.

The third thing Chris learns about his family as he eats dinner with his family after a long day of cleaning months in advance for Lunar New Year is that while Dad still writes in that very regular, blocky way, but he’s changed _what_ he writes. As always, Dad leaves them notes on the kitchen table in the morning and signs off as “Dad,” but one day, Chris spots the note Dad’s left for Mom. It’s the same stuff as always—Mom’s trying to improve her Chinese, so Dad writes her notes in Chinese (occasionally in traditional, just to annoy her) and only switches to English for the words he doesn’t know how to translate or forgot how to say. He always signs off with his initials—JC. But today, he sees something else—JKLC. It gives him an idea.

There is still no fourth thing.

The fifth thing Chris learns about his family as he fills out the forms every senior has to fill out prior to graduation, like how he wants his name to be said and what he’d like written on the graduation stole that the faculty advisor for students of Asian descent is subsidizing this year, is that he feels like he’s more _allowed_ to have his Chinese name despite not being fluent in Cantonese or Mandarin and that his English and Chinese names can coexist.

He carefully types out his full name into the form regarding his diploma and records the pronunciation of his name at least five times because he’s nervous that he hasn’t enunciated everything perfectly. He just hopes the announcer will at least attempt to pronounce the Cantonese right. For his graduation stole, which is a beautifully deep Samwell—“And Chinese,” Yeye says approvingly—red, his initials are painstakingly embroidered in gold.

CLFC. Chris Lokwai Franklin Chow. It feels right.

**Author's Note:**

> glossary:
> 
> popo - canto for maternal grandma  
> gonggong - canto for maternal grandpa  
> mama - canto for paternal grandma  
> yeye - canto for paternal grandpa
> 
> notes on their chinese names [here](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/166121205434/the-name-game). also if you liked the fic, pls reblog the link!! thank you so much!!! <3


End file.
